Mark Whitwell on The Hunt for Connection

Can I ask you reading this, very sincerely, are you Reality Itself?

Is your body at one with the cosmos?

Are you in profound harmony with the Natural World?

Are you connected to and utterly dependent upon air, sunlight, water, food, the green realm, and the male-female collaboration that brought you here in the first place?

Yes or no?

Just as the ocean is the context in which the fish swim, so Connection is the context in which we live, and the fish swim too! Connection is always the case and is utterly given. You don’t have to realize it, find it, discover it, or even feel it. Because you are it. You have a prior connection to the One Reality that is all Life. Nobody can take it away from you and nobody can give it to you.

However, here’s the thing. From the moment of your birth, you found yourself living within the cultural presumption that you are a separate body living in a separate world. Everybody is living within that presumption, so naturally, you took it on. The feeling of disconnection from the Nurturing Source of Life is abusive to us, it is literally painful to our bodies and minds. In our Doubt of connection, we live in chronic states of fear, anger, pain and grief in the body and nervous system.

There is No Necessity for Seeking

And so, from an early age, we hunt for connection.

First, there is food. We become obsessed with trying to find intimacy through food: overeating, under-eating, fasting, dieting, superfoods and health foods.

Then there are drugs: alcohol and cigarettes, pills and powders, and then we may move onto the refined hallucinogenic and psychedelic drugs in the search for the external substance that will enable us to feel connected.

Sex too becomes part of the hunt: exaggeration or celibacy, monogamous or polyamorous, moving back and forth between people who are all trying to get connected through one another.

Finally, there are Teachings and Teachers, old world and new world religions, gurus and saviors of all kinds, meditation methods and yoga techniques. We travel around the world visiting ‘special’ places and trying to meet ‘special’ people and learn ‘special’ practices in the hunt for connection. In the hunt for that external object that you can take to become permanently connected.

We assume that if you are a good person and go to church and obey the power structures then one day, if we are diligent but it never happens, we will pop out into an improved state, some kind of future realization of connection to Life.

The Secret

The secret is: you are already connected. You do not have this problem. You even admitted it yourself: you are the power, unspeakable beauty, intelligence and intrinsic harmony of the cosmos. You are Reality itself. Eternity has brought you here and is presently sustaining you. It has been done. Truth/Connection is already happening. You’re it!

You are to be forgiven. It is naive as imagining the world is flat or the earth is the center of the universe. It is taking a little while for humanity to make this simple adjustment to what is actually the case.

You were born into a mechanical repetition, a hell of endless duplication of limiting patterns that are being played out and compounding in reaction to each other. Even the methods to get free are born out of the same assumption of separation.

Everywhere humans are living in this dreadfully crippled way. There is no consolation in having a good career or in driving a Tesla because we can see just how restricted the whole thing is.

So, start with Reality! Give some time to the obvious fact that you are already connected — just as the fish are in the water.

The presumption of separation is a mirage. There is nothing substantial in it at all. What is substantial is the power of the cosmos that lives you. The body knows how to live and sit and be in your own Reality — the natural state. No obsession. No seeking. No philosophy is required.

What we require is a practical means to participate in what is always true, always the case. Yoga is participation ONLY in that which you are. It is giving what is above the heart. And it is given what is below to the heart. In the qualities of the whole body which is strength that is utterly receptive. Giving to each other which is the heart. Including personal intimate and sexual intimacy.

We start now to share this urgently with our friends and family.

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Mark Whitwell has been teaching yoga around the world for many decades, after first meeting his teachers Tirumali Krishnamacharya and his son TKV Desikachar in Chennai in 1973. Mark Whitwell is one of the few yoga teachers who has refused to commercialise the practice, never turning away anyone who cannot afford a training. The editor of and contributor to Desikachar’s classic book “The Heart of Yoga,” Mark Whitwell is the founder of the Heart of Yoga Foundation, which has sponsored yoga education for thousands of people who would otherwise not be able to access it. A hippy at heart, Mark Whitwell successfully uses a Robin Hood “pay what you can” model for his online teachings, and is interested in making sure each individual is able to get their own personal practice of yoga as intimacy with life, in the way that is right for them, making the teacher redundant. Mark Whitwell has been an outspoken voice against the commercialisation of yoga in the west, and the loss of the richness of the Indian tradition, yet gentle and humorously encouraging western practitioners to look into the full depth and spectrum of yoga, before medicalising it and trying to improve on a practice that has not yet been grasped. And yet Mark Whitwell is also a critic of right-wing Indian movements that would seek to claim yoga as a purely hindu nationalist practice and the intolerant mythistories produced by such movements. After encircling the globe for decades, teaching in scores of countries, Mark Whitwell lives in remote rural Fiji with his partner, where Mark Whitwell can be found playing the sitar, eating papaya, and chatting with the global heart of yoga sangha online. Anyone is welcome to come and learn the basic principles of yoga with Mark Whitwell.